TJ Walker says spend 10 minutes daily creating content around your hobby, then sell it on Amazon Kindle or Udemy. Most people can make an extra $1,000 a year this way, plus you spend less on other stuff because you're busy doing what you love.
Chapters
The biggest thing I think most people could do to help their financial position in 2020 and it's different advice from what it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago. The biggest piece of advice I have for people when it comes to improving their finances is to look at what their number one hobby is. How do they like to spend time and then spend just 10 minutes a day trying to make money from that hobby? How do you do that? If you love playing chess and you think about chess and you read about chess, write a book on chess and sell it on Amazon. There are no gatekeepers. When I was young, starting out early twenties, I spent probably five years chasing publishers to publish my first book on politics. You don't have to chase publishers for five years to get a publisher. You hit publish on Amazon, you upload it and you publish it. Are you going to make a million dollars with your book on chess? Probably not. But what if you made $5 a month from it? In a lot of countries that pays for several meals. If you don't want to write a book, do what I think is even easier. Make an online video based course. There are hundreds of platforms these days that will host your course on for free. All you have to do is record yourself talking. If you have a cell phone, you can do that. So to me, the number one habit to help yourself financially is to create something on a daily basis. Now you don't have to go crazy and do it 14 hours a day and quit your day job. I've created 143 online courses. In fact, Marceau, my colleague, is going to post a link to one of them where we have a special today. You don't have to make 143 courses. But if you spent just 10 minutes a day making videos about your passion, whether it is chess, whether it is a new computer program, whether it is the art of storytelling for children, it could be anything. But if you write about it every day and create enough content for a book, if you make videos on it and post those courses on udemy skillshare, Go skills, there's hundreds of platforms, then at some point you will start making money. I guarantee it. I don't guarantee you're going to get rich. I don't guarantee you're going to make a ton of money and can live a life of leisure and work two hours a day with a laptop or yourself on your chest in a hammock on the beach. I'm not saying it that way. It's not get rich quick, but if you don't even have $1,000 to cover expenses. I do think it is very realistic for any one of you, I don't care what country you're in, to make an extra thousand dollars in the next year through your own creations. If you just wrote 100 words day, I mean that's only a paragraph or two, you would have enough content probably about eight months to publish a book. You could do it in three months. Books don't have to be long now that they're self published and they could be short books on Amazon, Kindle and you charge $2.99 $1.99 and you can make money, create an online course, sell it for nine, ten bucks. Quite often get a couple of bucks each one. It will add up. Here's the other thing about finances and I found this personally. If you spend your time following a particular passion and reading about that passion and studying that passion and watching videos about that subject matter, that actually reduces your spending on other you don't have as much time for soccer games and cricket games and baseball games and you don't have quite as much time to go to the movies. Although I still like to go to the movies. If you're focusing and diving deeper into your passion, you're spending less quite often. Now you may spend some on books. I spend a lot of money every single week on more books on habits and personal development. But that's in part because I like to read paper books. If you're willing to read online on an iPad, on a cell phone, there are more than a million books available for free on Google books and other platforms online. So you don't have to spend a thing. Focus your energies creating something again, that's what's completely different about being a human being on planet Earth in 2020. That could not be said even 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, for the last 200,000 years of human type animals on this be said, for most of human existence you had to rely on the beneficence of a king or a dictator. You had to be a sharecropper. You had to hope for the whims of good weather to sell enough crops to keep from starving to death. You couldn't simply start a business. You couldn't create a product and sell it to the whole world. Today is different. Again, I'm not saying it's easy, I'm not saying it's get rich quick. But if your immediate task is how do you get a thousand dollar nest egg so that if you or your kid has to Get a new tooth or minor medical emergency or you need a new muffler on your car. It doesn't throw you into a crisis. It doesn't depress you. Because if you're worried about how you can pay to get your car out of the shop, guess what else happens? Your sleep habits disintegrate. Your eating habits disintegrate. First of all, you're not going to be able to buy healthy food. You're probably going to buy or just eat old stuff in packages and things already in your house in the back of the cupboard that are not particularly healthy. And unfortunately these days, the least expensive food, the McDonald's dollar hamburger stuff, it's also the least healthy for you. So that's the real problem. And that's why I'm begging you, if you don't have a rainy day fund, don't simply wait for a miracle. Don't wait for a rich person to drive by and toss a bag of gold out the window and land on the corner at your feet. Don't play the lottery. Apologize that this sounds condescending, but I do agree with Oscar Wilde, I believe, who once said, the lottery is a tax on the ignorant. Yes, people win, but 99.999% of people lose all their money in the lottery. That's not the strategy for you building the thousand dollar nest egg. And again, what's so different about today, what's exciting about today is you don't have to appeal to a gatekeeper, that lucky break, that foreman at the plant, to just give you that promotion. You don't have to cross your fingers and hope that publisher and that broadcaster in a big city on the other end of the country you live in gives you that stamp of approval to distribute your book, to sell your videos. You can do it yourself. You can create a video and sell it on Amazon. Now, I have not made a lot of money selling videos on Amazon, but you can do it. I have some for sale there. There are so many ways of making money just from what's in here. Your own ideas, your own creativity, combined with perhaps a little typing or a little speaking on camera or audio, you can make an audiobook and sell again. I've made audiobooks before. I didn't make much money. You might be more successful. So if you are not happy with your current financial state, I'm not asking you to spend every single evening, weekend, never have fun, never watch another soccer game or football game or baseball. I'm not asking you to give up everything, but I am asking you Carve out at least 10 minutes a day where you're creating something, you're working on a creation that you want to sell to the world. Now, you may say, well, T.J. you know, I want to keep my hobbies, my hobbies. Okay, I can respect that. But guess what? If you can't afford your car to go to the baseball because your car's in the shop, because you can't afford it, you're not going to be able to go to that next baseball game, whether to watch or to play. So you got to pick your poison. And if it's just 10 minutes a day and your hobby is spending two hours a day playing chess, for example, and spend 10 minutes a day writing a book about chess masters or creating a video on beginners for chess, you may be intermediate. You may be so far away from a grandmaster, it's not even funny. But if you've been playing chess for a couple of years, there's no reason why you couldn't create a course just for beginners. So that's my big suggestion for you. And I realize that it doesn't sound comforting if you don't have money. Sometimes it can be hopeless. And I've been there, and I've been there as an adult. But I'm telling you, no one is just going to come magically and wipe away your debt. Nobody's going to come give you all the money you need. You're probably not going to win the lottery. It's got to be up to you. And it's never been easier. Not saying it's easy, but it's never been easier to make money from your own creation. So I'm asking you, if you don't have a thousand dollars, are you willing to spend 10 minutes a day? Because I'm willing to bet a year from now you will have made at least a thousand dollars from your own creations. Give it a try.
